The bread remained upon the table. It would have taken very little for Rumpff to proceed with his meal, to flick aside with the flat of his knife those suspicious grains, and to attribute so curious a circumstance to one of those ordinary negligences of which any household offers daily instances; yet he paused, looked more closely, and resolved that another should examine what he had just seen.
In an affair already heavy with the dead, the dawn of discovery hung upon a meal left unfinished.
Gesche Gottfried lived in Bremen. Those about her had known her ministrations, her untiring zeal at the bedsides of the sick, that reassuring presence in which one rejoices when all others in the sickroom have exhausted their resources. Her reputation was long destined to remain bound to the name of the Angel of Bremen; after the trial, the very same appellation would take on so terrible an irony that one might readily forget it had first denoted unreserved trust.
At the Bedside
A young neighbour named Lene comes to assist in carrying the linen. She is not of the family; she was recommended because she is careful and knows how to keep silent in the presence of the suffering. Gesche shows her where to lay the sheets, bids her draw up a chair, and thanks her with a warmth that takes her by surprise. In the houses where Lene is accustomed to work, people notice chiefly what she has done amiss.
The sick woman calls out. Gesche enters at once; the neighbour remains upon the threshold, struck by such promptness to answer. She watches her smooth a pillow, lift a cup, wipe a mouth. The gestures are those she knows from her own mother, and it is precisely this resemblance that divests the scene of anything disquieting.
Later, when the room is empty and the linen must be carried away, Lene comes upon the selfsame objects. The cup differs in no way from the one used the day before; the care lavished upon the bed cannot alter the fact that someone is now missing from it. She weeps a little, then chides herself for her weakness, for Gesche, who kept such long vigils, appears more grievously stricken than she.
She offers to return.
Visits That Resemble One Another
In Gottfried’s actual life, the poisonings struck those nearest to her, reaching into her own family. Deaths and sicknesses followed in close succession around the woman who lavished her care; the nexus between this succouring presence and mortal peril did not immediately reveal itself.
Lene, however, had begun to keep count. She would not have called it by that name: she merely remembered the houses to which linen had been carried, the persons after whom she had inquired only to be told they were dead. Taken separately, each recollection belonged to the ordinary order of misfortune. Brought together, they caused her an uneasiness she felt to be shameful.
One evening, she spoke of it to her mother. The older woman replied that one must be careful what one said of people who devoted themselves to others; there was already ingratitude enough in the world. Lene acknowledged the justice of the remark, and it was this that silenced her. One readily imagines that silence is born of menace. It may also spring from good counsel, when it falls upon the wrong ears.
What Rumpff Had Examined
In 1828, Rumpff noticed a suspicious substance in his food and had its nature determined. This material fact shattered the circle of reassuring explanations. Gottfried’s arrest, in March, opened an affair in which past events had perforce to be brought together and viewed in an entirely different light.
Lene heard the news in the street. A woman seized her by the arm to tell her, with that singular eagerness that attends dreadful intelligence when one enjoys the privilege of being the first to impart it. She uttered Gesche’s name, then the word poison, and to the young neighbour it seemed that two impossible things had just been joined in the selfsame sentence.
She returned home to fetch the basket that had once been lent to her. It still sat beneath a table, filled with old rags. She emptied it with hurried movements, as though the object might retain something of its owner’s secret. Her mother watched her without speaking. Lene waited for an explanation; the old woman said at last that they could not have known.
“And yet I asked you…”
The sentence broke off. She had no wish to hold her mother to account for proofs that neither of them possessed at the time. She wished only that someone might acknowledge how difficult it had been for her to be afraid.
The City Before Its Own Trust
Three years elapsed between the arrest and the execution. Gottfried was put to death upon the Domshof in 1831. The inhabitants who had heard the tale of the poisonings saw public justice bring an end to a sequence of crimes perpetrated within the intimacy of domestic hearths.
Lene did not go to the square. Her mother asked if she feared the press of the crowd; she answered that she did not. What held her back was more difficult to utter: she had no desire to encounter those who would swear, that day, that they had always known there was something strange about that woman. She herself had not known. She had brought linen, admired her bearing, offered her help. She would have wished to understand that error without being compelled to disguise it as foresight.
Bremen preserved the memory of the execution, notably around a stone to which a tradition of spitting attached itself. The gesture offered passers-by a very simple means of demonstrating their abhorrence. Such simplicity was bound to please; the questions the affair left behind in the parlours of the city were far harder to frame.
A Chair Near the Door
Long afterwards, Lene was called to the bedside of a sick neighbour. She hesitated before taking the cup held out to her. The movement lasted but an instant, yet the bedridden woman noticed it and asked if anything were amiss.
Lene might have devised an excuse. She set down the cup, drew up the chair, and replied that she was sometimes afraid of what she did not understand.
“Then ask,” said the sick woman. “At least we shall have someone who asks.”
She remained until evening. She smoothed the pillow, changed the linen, opened the window a little; nothing in these gestures was to be surrendered to the memory of Gottfried. Care still belonged to those who sought to relieve suffering.
Only, whenever something struck her as singular, Lene no longer began by feeling ashamed of having noticed it.